JustinTeddyCliffe: January 2015

Happy New Year.

At the end of this blog I'm going to ask you to make one more New Years Resolution...

For me this is the first blog of the New Year and I'm hoping to get a lot more bloody bloggy here after.

Maybe that can be my New Years resolution?

Christmas was great, and it rolled quite nicely into New Years, which this time and for the first time in a while, I spent at home in Gobowen. Caught up with friends, spent time with family and ate heaps of meat.

HUURAH!

But this blog isn't about that. This blog is about cinema, one cinema specifically.

Over the festive period I managed to cram in a massive 23 movies, but on January 2nd I watched the most amazing of the 23 movies in a most remarkable place.

Me and Mum went along to a 2.00pm screening at Kinokulture in Oswestry. A small independent cinema that has transformed a old community space into a full operating cinema, and although the space has been transformed it's inclusive and community driven ethos seems to have remained the same.

I was amazed at what I saw upon walking up the four short flights of stairs from the entrance hall of the building to the large space above. It is the Tardis of cinemas. Seemingly small and mild from the outside, with only a few signs in the window and on the door that hint towards Kinokulture's amazing space hidden inside, you enter a building that has such a great history and feeling to it, that eventually, with a little exploration, opens up into this enormous and beautiful, bespoke and contemporary movie theatre.

It has a state of the art projector and screen, a full 80-100 seats racked back, that are genuinely more comfortable than any other cinema seats I've searched in. There confectionary is fairly priced and you can see there is a healthy, worldly ethos surrounding it, what with being able to by organic cola and health bars, as well as chocolate and crisps. I haven't even mentioned that our tickets were £6 each.

We saw Interstellar, I can't get into writing about the movie as this blog will become an odyssey, rather than the quick "on the bog" read it should be. All I will say is, if you haven't seen it, see it.

If cinema is to win the ever increasing struggle presented to it by the internet and the ease of home viewing, it has to be like this.

Kinokulture is warm, welcoming and full of heart. It is stripped of the commerciality and extortion we've put up with in mainstream cinemas for so long. It feels inclusive and it feels communal. Ran by people who love cinema and want to share those rare experiences of collectively viewing it. Admiring something beautiful, profound and thoughtful together. When we leave our living rooms and join other people in place like this, we are brought together and moved together. Laughing, crying and cheering together.

I had one of the best experiences of cinema I've ever had at Kinokulture, and looking at their line up of films for 2015 it seems like they're really not putting a foot wrong, offering a varied and interesting catalogue of stuff to watch from mainstream to foreign cinema.

If your from Oswestry or nearby and haven't wondered into Kinokulture I strongly suggest you do so.

But if you do make sure you arrive on time, because unlike Odeon, there isn't twenty minutes adverts before the movie starts, theres about 5 and there all just trailers to more great films.